Legibility
James C. Scott’s 1998 book Seeing Like a State identifies a pattern: governments need to see in order to control. Complex, local, illegible systems get flattened into simple, standardized, legible ones.
Forests become timber plantations. Cities become grids. Local names become standardized surnames. Traditional agriculture becomes collectivized farms.
Scott’s term for the ideology behind this: high modernism — “a strong version of the self-confidence about scientific and technical progress” combined with “the aspiration to the administrative ordering of nature and society.”
Brasília, designed in the 1950s according to Le Corbusier’s principles: wide boulevards, separated functions, everything visible from above. The planned city is so inhospitable that unplanned squatter settlements (favelas) emerged to provide what the design couldn’t — shops at street level, mixed use, human-scale disorder.
Scott identifies four conditions for planning disasters:
- State-imposed administrative ordering
- High-modernist ideology
- Authoritarian power to implement
- A civil society too weak to resist
Soviet collectivization killed millions. Tanzanian villagization displaced millions more. The complexity being erased often was the system.
The pattern repeats at smaller scales: org charts versus how work happens, specs versus what code does, metrics versus what you actually care about.
Legibility is useful. But it remains a model — it can never be the territory. When you optimize for the map, you break the territory.
Go Deeper
Books
- Seeing Like a State by James C. Scott — The definitive treatment. Dense but essential. Read the intro and chapters 1, 9, 10 if pressed.
- The Art of Not Being Governed by James C. Scott — Scott’s sequel on people who escaped state legibility.
- Two Cheers for Anarchism by James C. Scott — Shorter, more accessible Scott on everyday resistance to simplification.
Essays
- “A Big Little Idea Called Legibility” by Venkatesh Rao — The blog post that introduced Scott’s ideas to tech culture. Start here for the quick version.
Related: [[galls-law]], [[high-modernism]], [[rough-consensus]]